Surprising Commonalities
by Ifwecansparkle
Summary: CABIN PRESSURE. Martin is having a bad day, but he finds himself connecting to Arthur in a surprising way. Autistic!Martin, Autistic!Arthur.


**I wrote this a while ago, and thought I would post it in celebration of John Finnemore sort-of-confirming Autistic!Martin. This fic features bonus Autistic!Arthur for good measure. Enjoy, let me know what you think, and may all your autistic headcanons become canon. **

Martin Crieff felt that if he said, "being a pilot is hard," the general population would agree with him wholeheartedly. School teachers and accountants and shopkeepers and all the the people he could have been would line up to tell him that being a pilot was hard, and that they would never have the nerve or the patience or the skill to do it.

And they still wouldn't understand. There weren't words in his vocabulary to express how much they couldn't ever understand about all the reasons being a pilot was so difficult, and there weren't words in the world to express why it was more difficult, always more difficult, for him in particular.

He couldn't tell them about all the nights he spent suspended in time and frozen into wakefulness, re-writing his life and planning around his habits and his inabilities, carefully editing his dreams to be smaller and easier to achieve and, overall, a good deal closer to the ground, both literally and metaphorically. He couldn't tell them how it was frightening enough to be a man with a van, and a thousand times more frightening to wake up in the morning and keep a plane in the air when he still struggled to verbalize how the wings gave it lift.

It wasn't that he didn't know. It was never that he didn't know.

It was just that every single day was a balancing act on the knife's edge of a scream. It was just that he had yet to find the line between withholding an entire truth from Douglas and Carolyn and lying to himself. It was just that he was fairly certain a dream was not supposed to hurt so much.

Those were the thoughts Martin was concerning himself with, hunched over the steering wheel of his godawful van, in the godawful car park of Fitton Airfield, when someone knocked on his left side window. He glanced up to see Arthur peering in, with his nose pressed against the glass and his breath making foggy circles when he exhaled.

"I'm-I'm coming!" Martin fumbled for his words, knowing that Carolyn had probably been asking where he was for the past twenty minutes, and had no doubt sent Arthur to find him. "Tell Carolyn I'm on my way!"

The van door opened and Arthur slid into the passenger seat with a grin. "Hallo, Skip. Thought you might be out here. Mum's been looking everywhere. Well, not everywhere, of course, or she would have already found you. And obviously you can't look everywhere."

"Tell Carolyn I'm on my way in," Martin responded, straightening the collar of his uniform. "I'll be there momentarily."

"What're you doing hiding out here by yourself?" Arthur pressed. His trademark smile faded just a hair at Martin's distress. "It's really boring out here, and cold, and Douglas says if you don't come in soon, he'll have the cheese tray all to himself."

"Does he?" Martin questioned, absent-mindedly. "'Well, tell Douglas-" he couldn't quite think of what to tell Douglas. "I just needed a moment to compose myself. I just needed to think, and I'll be on my way in."

"Something wrong, Skip?"

"N-no, Arthur. Nothing's wrong. I'm just feeling a bit off, is all. I'll be fine. Yesterday was a bit-well."

Arthur nodded sagely, "Is this about your Aspergers?" His pronunciation had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, like he was parroting a word he had heard from his Carolyn. But that didn't stop Martin from freezing in his seat, panic clutching him.

"C-Come again?"

"Aspergers," this time Arthur spoke with authority, and with an easy grin, as if he hadn't just said the word that had been leaving a bad taste in Martin's mouth for years. "Right?"

It crossed his mind to lie through his teeth, to deny ever having heard that term. But he was exhausted and frazzled, and all things considered this was MJN, and Douglas was a smuggler, and Carolyn liked free pilots, and Arthur was in the passenger side of his car talking about Aspergers, and he laughed uneasily, blustered a bit, and finally asked, "how do you-figure that?"

"Oh, that's easy! You move a bit like me."

Martin had been too distraught to notice the frenetic movements of his hands until Arthur pointed them out. He instantly folded them together, chuckled again, nervously. "I don't usually-you too?"

"Yeah! I've never known anybody else who's got it. You're the first. Isn't that brilliant?"

Martin bit back the words hiding in wail at the back of his throat: that it wasn't brilliant, that he didn't want to talk about it, that didn't Arthur know that he wanted to rip that part of his mind to shreds and put it back together the right way. But he didn't say any of that. Instead he asked, "Do Douglas and Carolyn know?"

"Sure, Skip. Mum's got me, and Douglas was-"

"Going to be a doctor."

"Right."

"Oh God. Oh God."

"What's wrong?"

"No one was supposed to know, Arthur!"

"Why not?"

Martin ran a hand through his hair, "It's not good for my career. Do you understand?"

"Not really," Arthur admitted, tugging his own unruly brown curls.

"If people know that I have-"

Y"Aspergers."

"-They might think I was a a bad pilot."

"But you fly us around all the time. I think that's brilliant!"

"Really?"

"Sure, Skip! And Mum and Douglas think so, too," he paused and considered "Sometimes other people don't say what they're thinking, but they really do think so. I can tell."

"Th-thank you," Martin said, starting to calm down for the first time that day. "Arthur, can I tell you a secret?"

"Sure!"

"Being a pilot is hard."

"I know."

And for once, Martin thought, maybe someone really did.


End file.
